A business information, business intelligence, and/or enterprise system can improve an organization's ability to monitor and manage data in a complex business environment. For example, the systems offered by Business Objects SA of Levallois-Perret, France and SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany, provide components and tools that allow users to monitor, retrieve, view and manipulate business information, including business warehouse data stored and maintained as part of a company's overall business intelligence tools. By way of examples only, business information might be associated with a number of different product lines, profit values, customer groups, fiscal years, distribution regions, product costs, product quantities, revenues, and/or dates. Moreover, the business information may be stored and retrieved in a variety of ways. Examples of data sources include databases, such as, relational, transactional, hierarchical, multidimensional (e.g., OLAP), object oriented databases, and the like. Further data sources may include tabular data (e.g., spreadsheets, delimited text files), data tagged with a markup language (e.g., XML data), transactional data, unstructured data (e.g., text files, screen scrapings), hierarchical data (e.g., data in a file system, XML data), files, a plurality of reports, and any other data source accessible through an established protocol, such as, Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC) and the like.
In some cases, a user needs to retrieve some of the stored business information according to various intents, such as to: explore the information, create a display or report that shows the information and the like. The user may, for example, import a particular set of information into a spreadsheet application by entering a name or identifier into various cells in a spreadsheet to define what information should be associated with those cells, rows, and/or columns. For example, the user may associate a particular row with a measure such as profit and a number of columns with different fiscal years, where the years are associated with a dimension. Measures and dimensions may be defined, for example, in a metadata model associated with the stored business information. To associate a particular cell, row, and/or column with particular types of business information, a user may enter an identifier into a spreadsheet cell. For example, a user might type product names into a number of different cells in order to create a report showing how profitable each product was in a given year.
A user might also arrange for some spreadsheet cells to display information based on other cells in the spreadsheet. For example, a user might indicate that one particular cell should display a value representing the addition of values from two other particular cells (e.g., a cell representing “global sales” might display the result of adding the value of a cell representing “northern hemisphere sales” to the value of a cell representing “southern hemisphere sales”). In some cases, however, it can be difficult to enter and maintain appropriate the formulas and results in the spreadsheet. For example, if a formula is defined using a spreadsheet application it may be difficult to update the results of the formula as appropriate when columns and/or rows in a spreadsheet are changed. Moreover, providing a separate, dedicated formula definition editor may be confusing to users and lead to errors.
It would therefore be desirable to provide improved methods and systems that facilitate an efficient access and display of business information by a user, including situations where a spreadsheet application displays information associated with formulas.